This is Episode 32 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is “Do Not Be Ashamed” by Wendell Berry.

Wendell Berry is an American poet who has published more than 30 collections from 1964 to the present. His work was described by Andrew Angyal, a professor of English and environmental studies, as having “a commitment to the reality and primacy of the actual world”, a world where “nothing exists for its own sake, but for a harmony greater than itself which includes it”. 

Berry’s focus, then, is on the full breadth of the universal: on the world around him and the people within that world. 

This poem “Do Not Be Ashamed” is, I think, about the pressures to conform to the modern world. It was written in 1967, but its resonance, its way of speaking to me and you, its encouragement to find our voice even when doing so separates us from the safety-in-numbers that exists in unthinking compliance, is every bit as relevant today as it was more than half a century ago.

You can read "Do Not Be Ashamed" here.